For Microsoft, the traditional desktop is old news. It's on its way out, it's legacy, and the harder they claim the desktop has equal rights, the sillier it becomes. With companies, words are meaningless, it's actions that matter, and here Microsoft's actions tell the real story. The company has announced the product line-up for Visual Studio 11, and the free Express can no longer be used to create desktop applications. Message is clear.

"Consumers increasingly reject the old experiences in both their personal and work lives. For the 20-something and under crowd, the current Windows desktop experience is about as attractive as the thought of visiting a 19th Century dentist.

That entire article is excellent. Puts things in perspective for snobby developers. We serve the consumer, and the trends are overwhelmingly pointing towards a walled garden with curated apps with first class touch support.

PCs have gone mobile which means we need better battery life and that itself necessitates a new execution model. Having all apps running all the time is extremely wasteful.

Microsoft is for once, ahead of the curve when it comes to a converging ecosystem with a strong developer story. This leap into a new era will pay dividends for them.

"Puts things in perspective for snobby developers. We serve the consumer, and the trends are overwhelmingly pointing towards a walled garden with curated apps with first class touch support."

Call me cynical, but I believe microsoft wants us to serve their platform *instead* of the consumer.

"PCs have gone mobile which means we need better battery life and that itself necessitates a new execution model. Having all apps running all the time is extremely wasteful."

Not quite. There is absolutely nothing about the old win32s that necessitates applications to be running all the time (foreground or background). At their core, most windows applications are fundamentally built on top of a simple loop which is event oriented. So as long as the operating system is not sending it any events, the majority of existing applications won't use any CPU time. Go ahead and look at the task manager and check to see if your minimized programs are using more than 0% CPU, in the majority of cases the answer is "no".

"Microsoft is for once, ahead of the curve when it comes to a converging ecosystem with a strong developer story. This leap into a new era will pay dividends for them."

It's interesting you should say that. I used to think microsoft was more developer friendly a decade ago when I developed entirely for windows. Then everything changed around the time of Vista. OS programmers like myself were upset to witness our platform imposing new non-elective kernel lockouts and DRM controls that put a huge wrench in open source development. Even commercial developers were shafted when microsoft broke thousands of drivers. And customers were shafted when their hardware was no longer usable. 2K/XP drivers would already work as is if not for the DRM and lockout restrictions designed to make them not work. It was a slap in the face when 3rd party tools designed to allow end users to install XP and open source drivers were banned.

That was really the turning point for me as independent/open source kernel developers were clearly unwelcome on windows any more. Now they're going even further and restricting the installation of user space applications...well this is what I have to say about that: